Street Fight Daily: Foursquare Coupons, Edo’s Real-Time Offers

A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal content, commerce, and technology.

Edo Launches Real-Time Local Offers Platform, Tied To Your Bank Card (TechCrunch)
According to edo’s Jeff Fagel, the company wants to connect online advertising to in-store through its new advertising channel. “There’s an opportunity to change how consumers shop and save,” he says. Using its service requires very little effort on the consumer side. All you need is a credit or debit card.

Foursquare Joins the Coupon Craze (Wall Street Journal)
Foursquare doesn’t want to be another popular—but unprofitable—social network. Its new plan to make money? Personalized coupons. The company revealed for the first time that it plans to let merchants buy special placement for promotions of personalized local offers in July in a redesigned version of its app.

Four Reasons Why Andreessen Horowitz Is Investing $10 Million in Belly (AllThingsD)
Jeff Jordan, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, argued that Belly is not at all like Groupon. “It’s the anti-Groupon,” he said. “Groupon is doing lead generation through discounting. … What Belly is trying to do is loyalty.” The difference, Jordan said, is that Belly doesn’t require merchants to offer discounts to get consumers to come back.

Why Location-Based Services Will Create Multiple Winners At The Application Layer (TechCrunch)
Semil Shah: Despite the fact that these applications have yet to uncover robust business models (a common yet misplaced gripe), they could be incredibly valuable to larger companies (or even handset makers) who want to act on this data but don’t want to be seen as grafting it without permission.

My Green Lake Becomes Part of EveryBlock Seattle (Everyblock Blog)
After three years publishing her site, My Green Lake editor Amy Duncan came up with the idea of transitioning the community resource to EveryBlock. She writes: “I couldn’t be happier that the virtual community we have created here together will be able to continue.”

Digital First Media Chief: Newspapers Have Key Advantages in Local Online (Mercury News)
“The newspaper industry already has what all of our competitors want — scale,” said John Paton, CEO of Digital First Media, which has moved swiftly to repurpose its many newspapers, including this one, as digital publishers. “It’s a level of scale that Patch and other startups are now finding out to their chagrin is a huge barrier for entry into the business of local news reporting and advertising sales.”